The Permanent Tax Revolt

The desirability of a permanent tax amnesty

There are two main concerns about tax amnesty. First, if it is anticipated it may increase cheating and reduce the efficiency of the tax system. Second, amnesty may be inequitable by letting cheaters ‘off the hook’. However, several federal governments currently hold a policy of long-term, or permanent, tax amnesty, in apparent defiance of these concerns. This paper examines fully anticipated t...

The revolt of youth: some historical comparisons.

The existence of a youth problem appears to many a phenomenon peculiarly characteristic of our own time. In fact, in the United States over the past fifty years almost each generation has produced distinctive young rebels-the bohemians before and after World War I, the radicals of the thirties and forties, the beatniks and hipsters of the fifties, and the hippies and romantic anarcho-marxists o...

How Much Would a Permanent Tax Cut Boost Japanese Consumption?

Papers in a variety of disparate literatures have recently suggested that habit formation in consumption may explain several empirical puzzles, ranging from the level and cyclical variability of the equity premium (Abel (1990, 1999); Constantinides (1990); Jermann (1998);Campbell and Cochrane (1999)) to the ‘excess smoothness’ of aggregate consumption (Fuhrer (2000)) to the apparent fact that i...

The United Democratic Front and Township Revolt ^ South Africa

Recent years have witnessed the revival of organised mass opposition to Apartheid. Fighting in the townships, labour unrest, classroom revolts, rent strikes, consumer boycotts, worker stayaways and guerilla warfare all these have become familiar features of South Africa's political landscape since 1976. From the inception of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983, though, radical black oppos...

Revolt on the Nile: Economic Shocks, Religion, and Political Power